Description

"The New Play" and "A Girl's Yes" by Leandro Fern ndez de Morat n
two works translated by Robert M. Fedorchek, introduction by Sally-Ann Kitts

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Madrid-born Leandro Fern ndez de Morat n (1760-1828) wrote five plays: The Old Man and the Girl El viejo y la ni a], The Baron El bar n], The New Play La comedia nueva], The Female Hypocrite La mojigata], and A Girl's Yes El's de las ni as]. Two of them would change the theater in Spain.

At the close of the eighteenth century, in 1792, Morat n upended the status quo of melodrama with The New Play, a satire that takes aim at hacks cranking out works bereft of literary merit. Using as his vehicle a play within a play, he zeroes in on a pompous pedant, decries the rowdiness of the theater-going public, and ridicules a one-time lottery clerk and page who believes it's possible to write plays with neither preparation nor learning of any sort. And at the outset of the nineteenth century, in 1806, he censures the abuses of parental authority and absolute control over girls who are subject to a neglectful education and have no say whatsoever in the lives they lead. A Girl's Yes--plotted superbly, written impeccably, and standing as a showcase of the neoclassical unities of time, action, and place--soon became a stellar example of the very best of the classics that constitute Spain's rich theatrical repertoire. Even the Romantic successes of the Duke of Rivas's Don lvaro, or the Force of Fate (1835), Antonio Garc a Guti rrez's The Troubadour (1836), and Jos Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio (1844) would not eclipse the splendor of A Girl's Yes in the nineteenth century.